Subtitles of the Movie

Specularity can make something look like a showroom table top where everything is nice and shiny or make it look like something that's in a shack that was left in the woods forever. Specularity controls how much of the hot spot or how much something is going to be shiny. It also goes hand in hand with things called gloss in other applications. So I'm going to go to my Material Room here and I'm going to focus on the table top. So we have here a specular color and a specular value. Once again these control that hot spot that we're going to get here. You can also see that apparent here in the crevices, this hot, white spot. So if I take the specular value and I increase it to say something like three, notice how shiny this gets. So this is way, way too shiny. Someone took a whole bunch of wax and just went crazy. But we could always control that value by simply adding a turbulence to it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to where it says Specular Color and I'm going to click right here. I'm going to add a new node called Turbulence and right away look what happens. Turbulence is like a cloud, a cloud texture that just soaks up some of the specular and gives you a more realistic-looking effect. Sometimes though you do want things to be hugely shiny but in this case we don't. And that's really all you need to do to control that hot spot. Let's go ahead and take a render of this and see what it looks like. I'll actually tip it like this and we will do a render. You'll notice that it's a lot less shiny than the legs. So what you have to ask yourself when you're doing a render is what is the object? What's it made of? And what the condition of that object to really sell the shot. A good example of this is let's say you were doing a render of a fantasy saloon or a pub back in the day where we have knights and you have warriors and you have paladins and wizards and they're in a saloon or a pub and they're at a table that's extremely shiny. Well, back then I don't think that would look great. So to make your setting look more realistic, you would definitely drop that specular on that table. Now, go forward into the future into a really, really contemporary office building where everything's very angular and everything's very shiny and metallic. Of course a person would probably have a very shiny, shiny table top as well. So in that case you might very well want to have more specularity on that table top or even on the metal itself. So specular is really important and you really have to consider that because it can really help sell the shot. It can make things look like glass. It can make things look like rubber. It can make things look beat up, especially if you add a turbulence or some other type of filter in the 3D category that we saw there. So as you see here in the node that we chose for that, we went and I'll go ahead and right click, went to the 3D textures category so you can choose a noise to really break it up, which will look, well, not too good. Turbulence is my favorite thing to use for this but you can also use clouds, you can use some of the other things like wood, granite and so on based on what it is you're trying to convey.